SNS driven deployment (architectural overview)

3 Sep 2015: a note about how we're using php-fpm instead of suEXEC now has been published here.  Now back to your original post...

One of the problems I faced with getting Auto Scaling up and running was, "If I can't just ssh into the one live server and issue a git pull by hand, how do I push code out?"

Normal people would use capistrano, or Paste Deploy, or something, extended to access their auto scaling group to locate the hosts to use.  Or build on Heroku or Elastic Beanstalk to begin with.  I, however, am clearly not normal.

Bootstrapping an EC2 Instance, 2013 Edition

In the interests of "not implying old posts on my blog are still state-of-the-art", here's a quick overview of how I manage EC2 instances at work, modernized.

Controlling Internal Iteration

Once upon a time, I read this post on iterators.  Yesterday, a solution struck me for absolutely no reason.

How do you stop internal iteration without non-local returns?  Channels!